


Halcyon

by Transistance



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Aromantic, Asexual Character, Dreamsharing, Existentialism, Kissing, Multiple Selves, Other, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-04-24 09:03:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4913410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hare is full of questions, and the Cat is full of answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halcyon

**Author's Note:**

> I return briefly from my period of writing hiatus with _this_ , and am forced to apologize. It is by no means perfect, nor exactly what I wanted it to be. Stylistically it's a bit messy. Word-wise it's a bit messy. Character-wise I think I'm probably also way out. Hey ho, though, hey ho.

He stood solitary beneath the eaves of those clasping branches, twig-ends reaching up to strain toward the beating sun above as it pulsated its rays down onto the green earth, warming the soft fur of his ears and washing the trees golden around him as though he stood before a furnace rather than a cross-roads. The summer was not quite free of their land; it strained onward, bleaching the day beautiful as it dragged itself toward its end. A pocket watch was extracted from its residence on his tweed, its spinning needle consulted and then deemed unsatisfactory as he returned it to its home.

She was not here yet, but he knew she would be. It was in her nature to come when desired.

Last year's dry leaves rustled around his feet, whispering in their earthy voices about how much they resented his invasive presence on their hallowed place of rest and how arid the season had been and how their brittle old veins were cracking in the heat. The breeze picked up suddenly and bade them swirl up a vengeance around his calves, brushing his fingertips.

By the time that they had settled still, he was not alone.

Her presence could be felt heavy in the air around him before the first trailing touch curled low across his back, dancing up and down and crawling across his waist, his stomach, his chest before she stepped out of the shimmering air before him, eyes bright and grinning her usual lazy grin.

“Well, well, well,” she purred, voice dripping. “If it isn't the Hare, come hopping into my paws of his own volition for the first time in... Remind me, how long?”

“Cat-” he managed, but then she was against him, pushing him backward step by step until he hit one of the silent wooden observers of her ritualistic greetings, and then she was kissing him, mouth full of heat and hunger and teeth. Somehow his clothes had been invaded by her stealth-gifted hands already, pressing circles into his breast and digging her thumbs along the line of his clavicles. Her own body's fluid motions hauled a moan from him, seized immediately between her jaws and devoured only to be regurgitated in her own voice and her movements only increased in their breathtaking need as his hands twisted ribbons out of her hair and shackled her close to his body. The purring had increased tenfold in volume, a hundredfold, its pleasured thunder drumming in his thoughts in sync with her desperate undulations.

The Hare broke away first, lifting his head away from her so that her missionary tongue could not quite reach to engage his mouth in any further nonsense such as that, but was unsurprised when her teeth nipped the hanging tip of his ear in punishment before she ducked under his exposed neck to kiss at his throat.

“Cat,” he said again, a little more hoarsely, and to his relief she went still.

“Hare,” she agreed more softly still, that lilting predatory edge still sing-song sharp in the back of her voice. And then, playful, “Do you mean to tell me that you're _not_ here to finally relinquish yourself to me, to give in to the taste of this particularly feline forbidden fruit?”

He could hear her smiling as she touched lips to his neck again, gentle now, and as she began to slowly run her tongue along the skin, wet and rhythmatic. The Hare closed his eyes and let her get away with it, the familiarity of the action soothing. “Ah,” he breathed, only to undermine the obvious moment of weakness by answering her question. “No. You know I can't as well as I do.”

“People change,” the Cat murmured, pausing her shallow grooming to suck at his skin around her half of the conversation. “Who knows, it might have been my lucky day.”

The comment set him off – and she knew him well enough that she must have meant it to – and suddenly he was trying to stop the laughter escaping him from spilling over her, his shoulders shaking against the space that had seconds previously been occupied by her teeth and she faded out of his arms only to reappear almost immediately in front of him, holding one cloaked finger up to his mouth in a request for silence, her eyes full of that particular cynical satire.

“Hush,” she whispered, and he bit his tongue in an effort to comply. It was undignified to lose control of himself so freely, he knew, but only knowing could not stop the hilarity overtaking him. He was mad, perhaps, mad as the month he was named after that had birthed him into this lucid world of sound and luminous elasticity of light, but it was not such a very terrible cross to bear. Indeed, if anything it was companionable.

Sometimes, on and off, he caught the Cat looking at him - or anyone else - with some achingly untouchable emotion in her acidic eyes and wondered if she were quite as loose as she made herself out to be.

Said eyes were watching him now, close and half-lidded, every tooth visible in the half-moon that lounged beneath them. “ _Well_ then, if you won't debauch me, come. Let's take a walk, shake the scenery up a bit, shall we?” The Cat turned away before the Hare had even nodded assent, her tail flicking up with each easy swing of her hips. His eyes tried not to follow the mildly erotic movement, knowing that to acknowledge that she was in any way appealing would convince her of a falsehood, but he failed miserably. The crisp difference in the magenta colours drew the eye, fixating it lower on her body than was in any way decent. 

As he watched, she bent backward over to angle her head and look at him again – without breaking stride – leaning herself lower and lower until suddenly she vanished again, reappearing a moment later by his side. 

“I'm excited to be with you again, lover, you know. Why do you never come to visit? I get all cold and lonely with only stiff old wood to entertain me.”

“I've been busy,” he replied, and didn't protest when her arm slid into his. “And I am not your lover, in any sense of the word.”

He caught her grin stretch further in the corner of his eye before she answered. “We both know you would be if you could _afford_ me, Hare.”

“We both know that I trade in a wholly different currency than you, Cat.”

“All currency has its exchange rate.”

“And is that not what we do on days like this? Exchange?”

A considering silence fell, and he felt her back down. “You're right. You're right! My dear dead stud, you are right.” But then her free hand was in his hair, ruffling it and bothering his ears in the same movement of disrespectful congratulation and he shook himself free of her to stand outside her reach.

She pouted, ears flat back against her skull, and then abruptly sat down, perching on an exposed root. Reaching out a hand, she patted the gnarled bark beside her and raised her eyebrows teasingly.

He preferred chairs but sat anyway, ignoring the way she shifted herself so that their thighs sat flush against one another and their breaths practically mingled. He knew he would be finding her stray hairs on him for days, maybe weeks from now, but had resigned to that reality long ago.

The blush of the now frail sun, their dying supernova still enslaved to the blue bowl of whatever lay above everything else and sweating for it, chalked the Cat's cheeks orange and rendered her glasses dazzling. The tilt of her head suggested she was watching him again, as did how very still she had gone, and then without warning she grabbed his collar and pulled him hard into another unwarranted snog.

Upending their designated roles of nature, he bit her, causing her to jerk away with a sharp noise of alarm. “ _Hare!_ ”

“Stop doing that! You're only leading yourself on.”

She was pouting again, and slowly opened her mouth to move her tongue along the wound. “You didn't have to _bite_ me. It'd be alright if you were _into_ that, but there's no call to just needlessly cause me pain. I know you won't lie with me, don't worry – but why shouldn't I kiss you? You like it. _I_ like it. We-”

Her hurt forced the choked mirth up from him again, and he didn't attempt to stem it this time. “I _like_ it, Cat, and I like you, and I like doing this with you, but please understand that I simply do not want your tongue down my throat every second that we spend together! It's not a viable way to spend the time.”

He could see the clouds amassing on the horizon for their last performance of the dusk, congealing together in a rolling rosen myriad of red hues as they prepared to be lit up, caught among the stretched black scratches of the trees waving fingers, inky lines fixed upon the multispectral canvas. And he could feel the eyes of the Cat, boring holes through his head, dissecting him to see what it was that made him tick.

He didn't rightly know the answer to that himself, and was relieved when she only sighed and said, “...Fine, then. It's not as though I've a deficiency. What does a cute little head like yours deem a _viable_ method of spending an evening, then? Please, enlighten me. I'm _dying_ to know.” 

For a moment his tongue was stuck, the questions that wriggled in his mind squirming away from the cooling evening air where they would be so exposed to the Cat's hungry scrutiny, and after a silent stammering start he managed, “You know I have always respected you.”

It was her turn to let out an amused snort, turning her phosphorescent eyes to meet his own. “Has the sky fallen on my head?”

The Hare matched the noise of her humour, attempting to swat her façade of incredulity away with one hand. “No, no, I do! You are the most... You are not the same as most of us. You... You drift. Does that make sense to you?”

“I drift?” One red eyebrow quirked, and she tilted her head, frowning slightly. “Oh, dear, you do come out with oddities sometimes, don't you? My poor confused lagomorph, you must learn to articulate yourself! You know women won't like a man who don't speak so proper.”

Women probably didn't like men who sniggered quite so readily either, but the Hare did so. “Well, it's a good thing I am not a man, then, is it not? I am only a hare.”

The Cat laughed, and then sighed, and then put her hand over his own where it rested on the earth. “Really, though, dear – or rather, Hare – what did you come to me to ask?”

The Hare's ears drooped a little further, and he avoided her eye in favour of the billowing clouds, shaded purple now as the sunlight bled out of the sky. He adjusted the position of his glasses by a fraction before asking, “I – Cat, what form do your dreams take?”

“Iambic pentameter,” she answered without pause, and the Hare shook his head.

“No, I mean- what's in them?”

“You, often. Usually naked and wildly out of character. The Hatter, sometimes – in much the same state – and every other creature here.” Her grin seemed to split her face clean in half, every tooth gleaming dangerously in the shallow dusk that was beginning to fill the air between them. But he had to know, still, in spite of it all.

“Do you ever dream about yourself?”

“Of course! What point would there be to dreaming at all if I were a mere observer to the figurative happenings in my head?”

“No, I mean – Not from your point of view, just...” To his horror he felt his face heat, steadily convinced that the Cat – the only person he had thought to turn to to ask – had no idea of what he was talking about. “No, forget it. It's stupid.”

She moved quite suddenly, more serpentine than feline, twisting round to cup his face in one hand much more suddenly than could have been merited in spite of the fondness of the gesture. “No,” she murmured, and didn't let him pull back. The delicate edge of her sleeve brushed against his mouth, and the soft material of her glove was smooth as she stroked his cheek. “No, Hare, I know what you are talking about. Of course I do. I was only teasing, hm? Of course I dream about her.”

The Hare looked up sharply, and turned a little on his axis in an attempt to see her better in the fast fading visibility. “You do? Really? Why is it never spoken of?”

“Because everyone is like you. They think it's just dreams, just the simplest nothings of the mind, until they don't and then they get scared – and then, eventually, they come to me.”

“You're different,” the Hare explained, as though it was an excuse. “You are the crossroads. Who else would be approachable?”

She rolled her headlamp eyes and smirked. “ _Darling_ , I'm the looking-glass! Things are so much clearer when distorted through the eyes of another; you come to me to hear what you want to hear, or – not in your case – feel what they know I can make them feel. I'm here, I'm there-” And indeed she was suddenly gone, vapid as mist and as soluble into the dark air until she reappeared standing a little way from him; she held a hand out in his direction and gestured him up. “Come. There's things I want you to see.”

He stood as the sun disappeared, spreading dim fingered blindsides across the floor of his vision. “Cat – I'm not night-sighted-”

Her hand was around his wrist and the strength behind it wrenched him along behind her, the pace at which she ran slightly faster than he was comfortable with, especially given that he couldn't see, and he stumbled more than once only to be hauled up without comment. It was impossible to tell were they were going, the greyness fuzzy and indistinct to his disadvantaged eyes.

She stopped abruptly when they burst free of the line of the trees, turning to hook herself securely onto his front and letting his clumsy feet bring them both crashing back to the ground.

Dew and moonlight congealed upon each dagger-shaft of grass, monochrome under the new-born light of the waxing rock, and the Cat breathed and moved beneath his fallen form.

The Hare dragged himself up a little into a more comfortable position, and then lowered himself carefully to kiss her again. She was a gorgeous warmth in the night, her fingers clutching at his shoulders as he pressed his chest down against hers and tried to match her rhythm with slight living motions of his own, to please her. There was a moment of slackness in her mouth as she whined, high and full of partially sated lust, and then he was up and off her, pushing back to seat himself crosslegged in the wet grass.

The Cat just lay where he had left her for a moment before disappearing and reappearing at his ear.

“Very nice. Bravo, my man, bravo. You almost had me convinced.”

“Tell me why we dream.”

“Straight-forward and to the point tonight, aren't we?” Fond exasperation coloured the discordance of her mercurial voice, and she took the time to settle herself comfortably beside him again before expositioning any further. “But I'm afraid I can only in honesty confess that I don't rightly know. I have theories, of course – I have many theories – but as of yet, no proof. Do you want to hear?”

Crippling doubt clawed at the Hare's throat again, so he laughed a little, shakily, at the strangeness of it all. “Yes.”

“It could be that we are dead,” she said, voice dropping to something soft as she held the concept up to examine its fractals in the moonlight. “And that this is some strange afterlife, and that what we see is convoluted memories from whatever odd existence we held when we were alive.”

The Hare frowned, the idea sitting skewiff with him. “I feel alive. Would we not... _know_ , if we were dead?”

She spread her hands wide and did not bother to answer. “Another possibility is that we are simply all tarred with one particular branch of instability, and this seed in our heads will always flourish into the same dappled plant, as though we are all connected by rings through the head.”

He felt her crawl closer to him again, and she put one closed fist against his chest. “But it still doesn't sit quite flush, does it? It's all too imprecise. So the proposition I give you, my dearest lop-eared compatriot, is this: your soul sits unfixed, and wanders uninhibited when you sleep. You are _him_ and you are you and maybe you are a thousand other Hares, a million, undefinable and inconsistent and one and many and _you_. The only problem is that I absolutely cannot make my mind up as to whether this reality is the real one and we are the ones who experience all others, or if what we glimpse is reality and _this_ is nothing but gas in our own vapid, abused heads, wherever we are.”

Her fingers opened and spread wide across the centre of his lungs, and he felt her nails – claws? He had never asked – click against the frantic thick walls of his throbbing heart.

“Tell me about your dreams,” hissed the Cat. “He's... Will isn't it, yours? William?”

“...Yes. His name is William T Spears.”

“They've all got such strange names,” she replied, still hushed. “They're all... alien. What's he like, then? Who is he?”

“Cold,” he murmured. “He does not laugh.” It seemed the appropriate time to adjust his glasses again, and having done so he frowned again, and then abruptly lay back into the misted grass to stare at the unabridged expanse of the sky. 

The ringing noise of the droplets shattering amongst the glass grass as the Cat moved made his ears twitch in warning before she was upon him, soft and cloud-light, her knees worming a space between his legs and her chin coming to rest on her crossed gloves on his barrow ribcage.

The eerie glow of her uranium eyes blinded him to the moon.

“Is he the same as you?” she breathed, and he felt her tail twitch against his leg.

“In this regard? I've no idea. I've never known him to do anything that would suggest he feels otherwise than what I do – but I don't know him very well at all. Is your... Grell, is it? Is he different to you?”

“ _She_ ,” the Cat corrected very pointedly and without humour, “Is a little different, yes.”

“Sorry,” muttered the Hare. “Sorry, I've only seen... Them? Her? I've only seen her though William's eyes. His displeasure is rather overwhelming.”

The creature lying atop him perked up slightly, apparently interested. “At her? Because he hates her or because he loves her, do you know?”

“Does it matter? I've no idea – I told you, he's cold – but the output's the same either way, is it not?”

She shrugged, the movement shifting her endless hair a little to fall more encompassingly across him. “I think it would matter to Grell, although hell knows if you telling me anything would trickle through to her. She loves him.”

“What? Why?” This revelation came as a genuine surprise, more because the Hare was convinced that William was singularly dislikeable though anyone's eyes as well as his own than because he hadn't noticed the way Grell looked at _her_ colleague in their bizarre office setting.

The Cat looked down her nose at him as though he were stupid. “Look, I told you she and I were different. She's attracted to Will for the same reason I'm attracted to you, except that she's got a debilitating carnal urge for the deficiency know as _affection_ , which I was so mercifully born without. She's blinded to his failings as a person by her feelings for him alongside the consistent belief that he'll come round eventually.”

The Hare was frowning again, horrible confusion having seeped its way through him. “I don't understand that at all.”

“I know.”

He moved himself to link his arms over her back, and found that moving them a minute space back and forth fished a low purr from her cracking throat. “Do you think... If they die, do you think we..?”

Her eyes were shut, blissful, and she sounded sleepy when the answer did arrive. “Don't think so. The Queen's still alive, isn't she? Was Will privy to the particular little number that was done to her?”

“I'm not certain. I don't know. I don't think he ever met her. As I've never met the Queen, herself.”

“Hm,” said the Cat. “She's got all these pallid little footmen, you know the ones – mousey, peaky – they're always hurrying about the place. I've no idea what tie they – he? - have to Grell, in their world, but looking at them always feels strange.”

“I've seen them,” he replied, nodding. “They seem to be scared of everything and everyone.”

Her weight removed itself from him quite suddenly, rolling over from atop him to curl up warm at his side. “I've never spoken to any of them,” she confessed. “They see me coming close, and they scatter like doves.”

A thought occurred quite suddenly to the Hare, and he put a hand to the pocket of his waistcoat, withdrawing the watch. “It must be late, Cat – here, can you see well enough to tell me what time it is?”

She took the timepiece from him and held it before saying, ever so quietly, “You know that this clock doesn't function, right?”

“Nonsense,” he rebuked, taking it back from her unresisting fingers. “It ticks, doesn't it?”

 _Tick tick tick tick tick_ , the clock agreed, frantic and erratic. He couldn't remember where he had found the old thing, but had kept it about himself as a habit since. Its consistency was comforting.

The Cat's nose was a small thing, pointed, and she pushed it against the flesh of the Hare's neck as she contoured herself to match the outline of his body, and after a moment he turned onto his side and held her close against him. His natural predator, she was soft and alive and he liked the feeling of her skin, the most innocent of pleasures being had through such a shallow touch.

Her fingers were slim and delicate as they painted spots across his shoulders, and he parted the fine webbing of her hair to plant kisses on the skin of her scalp, praying that they would grow into a dandelion crown.

“I do sometimes wonder if we're not just a fantasy,” she breathed, eyes full of stars and voice one with the cosmos above them, all around them, within them. “Some flagging kid's acid dream.”

The Hare laughed, a stilted thing, and let his eyes slip shut.

“Would it matter?”


End file.
